Can Atheism Explain Evil?

Response to Mr. Zod

“Why are some things always bad? Why is there a category of badness, evil, or wickedness?”

Yesterday I saw the atheist YouTuber Mr. Zod attempting to answer this question which was posed by Christians to atheists online. You can watch Zod’s response here:

If you watched that you might initially find his answer very compelling, but I assure you… it isn’t. It’s filled with mistakes, conflations, and ignorance.

Unfortunately Zod isn’t the only atheist that makes these basic mistakes, it’s incredibly common among atheists.

Because of that I believe going through this response will be very instructive.

Now let’s begin.

“Some things are bad because some things cause people harm.”

The first thing Zod does is make the claim that things are “bad” because they cause harm. I hear this sort of answer from atheists all the time and it demonstrates they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s even being asked. Here’s why:

Firstly, this doesn’t really answer the question, it’s circular. Why does Badness exist? Because actions cause people harm. But for this to make sense it must be the case the harmful actions are bad. Therefore, the argument is really this: bad stuff exists because bad stuff (harmful actions) exists.

This answer also confuses epistemology with ontological grounding. When a Christian or a theist asks “why are some things always bad,” they’re asking why “badness” exists if atheism is true. They aren’t asking, “Can you point to things in the world that you consider bad?” They’re asking how you explain the existence of badness on a worldview where there’s no purpose, no design, no intention, no objective values, etc. To really illustrate my point, imagine an atheist saying they believed in sin. Everyone would find that bizarre because sin doesn’t make sense without God. So we’d all rightly ask, “how do you ground the concept of sin in a worldview that’s Godless?” Or imagine talking to someone who didn’t believe in government but still believed that laws existed. Wouldn’t we all ask them, “Where do laws come from?” And that’s what we’re asking the atheist. Where does badness come from if there’s no God? When atheists try to answer this by pointing to things like harm and saying “well this is bad” they’re answering a different question. They’re answering the question “what stuff in the world do you think is bad?” But that’s a totally different sort of question. If a person doesn’t believe that governments exist but they believe laws exist, and you ask them where laws come from, and then they say “well it’s against the law to murder,” notice that in no way touches your question. They’d have no idea what you’re even asking. That’s what Zod is doing. He doesn’t even understand the question.

“Things are always bad or evil because they cause irredeemable harm”

Zod then attempts to explain universal bad, or why badness in all times and places exists. To this question he says that murder, abusing children and bigotry are always bad because these are actions that cause irredeemable harm.

The problem with this answer is that he’s still confusing epistemology with ontological grounding. Imagine we ask, “Why are diamonds always hard?” And he says, “We notice diamonds are always hard because every time we see a diamond it is extremely difficult to cut.” Notice the question he is really answering is, “Why do people think diamonds are hard?” and this answer has nothing to do with what actually makes diamonds hard in the first place.

This answer is also begging the question. Things are always bad/evil if they cause irredeemable harm. That means irredeemable harm = always bad/evil.

In other words, we have the syllogism:

1. Things are always bad or evil because irredeemable harm exists.

2. Irredeemable harm is defined as always bad or evil.

3. Therefore always bad or evil things exist

Do you see the problem?

Zod also says “most of us” would say that these things are always bad, but would they still be bad if most of us didn’t say or believe this? If everyone woke up tomorrow with amnesia, would these things no longer be bad? If something is always bad then the opinion or observation of humans should have nothing to do with it.

“You can’t reach across cultural boundaries by appealing to God”

At this point, Zod really goes off the rails.

He says that he thinks what Christians are really getting at is that you can’t resolve cultural differences without invoking God.

So if one culture believes that female genital mutilation is good and another culture does not, the only way you can solve that dispute is with God. That’s what Zod believes Christians are trying to get at.

Zod says, actually, they’re just going to tell you to go kick rocks, and that the only way you might get a different culture to stop doing immoral things is by appealing to reasons and shared values, these sorts of things.

But he’s once again extremely confused.

First, this has nothing to do with what we’re asking. We aren’t saying that God is what is going to help us settle disputes about right and wrong, although He could, but that’s not the argument.

The question is: how do you ground badness or wrongness on atheism, without God?

It doesn’t have anything to do with culture.

And he should know that it doesn’t have anything to do with culture, because the question is about something being always bad.

If something is always bad, what would that have to do with cultural differences, or with convincing one culture to adopt the values of a different culture?

That has nothing to do with what would make something always bad, or what would ground something as a universally bad thing.

It has nothing to do with that whatsoever.

It’s like talking about “fastness.” How is it the case that really fast animals exist?

And then he thinks you are asking, “Why do some animals run faster than others?” Or, “How do we get some animals to try to move faster than others?” Or, “What is the best method of making animals all as fast as possible?”

This has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.

“Badness exists because we notice certain actions produce certain outcomes and we come up with certain words for them”

This is probably the worst part of this entire portion of Zod’s response to the question.

He says that badness exists because we have invented the word badness in order to explain that there are consequences to things. This is unbelievably naive and just shows that he has no grasp whatsoever of what he’s talking about.

Imagine saying that cheetahs exist because we noticed that there are animals that run really fast and we created a word for them, the word “cheetah.”

Does our creation of the word cheetah explain why a cheetah exists?

No. It has nothing to do with why that animal exists.

Conclusion

Zod, like many atheists, can only think superficially about this issue. He fails to recognize that we’re asking a metaphysical grounding question.

We’re not asking whether you can identify bad actions.

We’re not asking why people believe badness exists.

We’re not asking how cultures can be persuaded to agree about what’s bad.

We’re asking a very different question:

What is the grounding of badness on your worldview?

Without God, without objective values, and without any intentional source of reality, what is the source of “badness” itself?

What, within your worldview, explains why badness is a real feature of the world that we experience?

That’s the question.

And Zod, like the vast majority of atheists, completely fails to even understand what’s being asked.